1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to design and manufacturing method of a semiconductor device (a semiconductor integrated circuit) and, more particularly, to a semiconductor device pattern creation method, pattern data processing method, pattern data processing program, and semiconductor device manufacturing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the recent increase in the degree of integration and the operation speed of semiconductor integrated circuits, requirements of microfabrication in device pattern formation are becoming very rigorous. However, shortening the irradiation light wavelength in exposure apparatuses or the increase in numerical aperture (NA) of optical systems cannot sufficiently meet the requirements of microfabrication, and the margin necessary in the lithography process is hard to ensure. For this reason, it is important to increase the accuracy of a resolution enhancement technique (RET) and optical proximity correction (OPC). However, the margin can hardly be ensured even using RET and OPC. The difficulty of the lithography process to achieve microfabrication increases, posing a serious problem of increase in lithography cost.
The requirements of microfabrication are especially conspicuous in a device calls a system LSI. In designing a system LSI, a cell library is often used in which a plurality of modules called cells with individual functions are gathered. In chip design, cell patterns included in the cell library are placed on the basis of circuit information determined by circuit design, and a predetermined function is implemented by routing between or in the placed cells (e.g., Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 6-291186). To shrink the chip area, individual cell patterns must be shrunk. To shrink the cell patterns, the device pattern must be microfabricated. Hence, the difficulty of the lithography process inevitably increases.